That student conference at Wesleyan University, culminating in proposals for the reform of football, recalls an issue which has been discussed for a full decade. Do athletics, especially intercollegiate athletics, promote or hinder the cause of education? President W. T. Foster of the Reed College at Portland, Oregon, has been one of the most outspoken in condemnation of what he calls "exaggerated emphasis" on college sports. He asks our attention to "the weaklings among the undergraduates who spend their hours in cheering a football hero and their money in betting on him, while the man of highest achievement in scholarship is either ignored or condemned with unpleasant epithets." And an article he wrote on the subject for the Atlantic Monthly closed with the words. "The call is for inexpensive, healthful and moderate exercise for all the students, especially those who need it the most. The colleges must sooner or later meet that call. Their athletics must be for education, not for business."

These opinions have been repeated, with varying emphasis and from different lines of approach, by other college presidents and educators. But the most vigorous pronouncement of all came this week from Dr. Stewart Paton, the psychiatrist of Princeton University and trustee of the Carnegie Institution at Washington. He calls football as played today "a menace to the mental and physical welfare of the players, upon whom its long, grilling practices and tense games impose an often unbearable physical strain." Fortified by investigations into the case of a boy who was found to have played through a whole game "in a state of mania, a menace not only to himself but also to the other players," Dr. Paton feels himself justified in condemning "football hysteria" as "a producer of both physical and mental deterioration." Under its influence, he maintains, the mental life of American universities is being "lowered to the dead level of mediocrity." The students are "required to do so much cheering in common that they begin to think alike and consequently to lose in initiative and freedom of thought." And on such grounds as these the Princeton scientist reaches the conclusion that in the European universities, despite their crippled condition, "there is more independence, and the spirit of investigation is more active, than in American colleges and universities."

If the evil has not been exaggerated, what is the remedy? And what do the students say for themselves? At the Wesleyan University conference they were agreed that football needs to be curtailed in the interest of education; their recommendations include the reduction of the number of intercollegiate games to four, the abandonment of "championships," a graduate coaching system on a professor's salary basis, and no direction from the coaches during games. And if college athletics really need revision what more promising sign could there be than the undertaking of that task by the students themselves? --The Boston Herald.